Last year courseindex.com featured a story about a new centre for cyber security at Bletchley Park in the UK, a ‘Hogwarts for hackers’ designed to recruit the best young minds in I.T. in the fight against cyberterrorism and other computer-based threats to national security.
In today’s world of just-in-time learning, where it’s perfectly possible to get a degree-level education without needing to spend tens of thousands on an actual degree, a lot of what we need to learn can be had for free. It can also be had when we need it, rather than forming part of a three or four-year program and being forgotten by the time we come round to needing to use it.
Sometimes at school students miss something important due to absence, inattention, teacher sickness or sporting commitments. Alternatively they might struggle with the subject in general and need extra support to get them through the year with good grades. Conversely, some students may be particularly fascinated by a subject and wish to deepen their knowledge. In the case of geometry, which forms the foundation for many disciplines and, ultimately, careers, taking extra online classes from an expert can help students to really nail down this fundamental subject.
Cuddly Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is the figurehead of a new educational enterprise aimed at training the next generation of tech wizards and fast-tracking the most promising ones.
A virtual reality simulation of a nuclear facility is one of the new training tools presented at the 61st IAEA General Conference in September. Training specialists will be using it to navigate through realistic scenarios, threats and risks. The 3D tool is focused on preventative and protective measures against insider threats, and there are plans to cover other areas of nuclear security in the future.
It’s official. We now live in the future. Why? Because we have self-driving cars. We even have a few flying cars, that long-fantasised-about sci-fi staple. Pretty soon autonomous vehicles will be mainstream, and the industry will need armies of young boffins to design and engineer them. So it’s about time there were courses that introduced smart young people to the autonomous vehicle industry and prepared them for careers in it.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Ever since the robot dog K-9 appeared in Doctor Who in the 1970s, geeks of a certain age have fantasized about having a metallic sidekick that does most things a real dog would do but doesn’t need to poop and can beat them at chess.
